2. Introduction
There are many varieties of normative ethics and many versions of each variety. I shall focus here
on a selection of approaches that appear to be particularly useful and relevant to areas of
application such as business ethics or professional ethics. My main focus will be on three sets of
theories. Utilitarianism judges actions by their consequences, assessed in terms of some measure
of utility. Its application typically takes the form of a kind of cost-benefit analysis, but applied to
the utility function for society at large rather than to that for a particular actor. Kantian ethics
focuses on the actions themselves and the principles that might be adopted to guide people in these
actions, irrespective of their consequences. It suggests that people have an unconditional ethical
duty to follow principles that are universalisable and that treat people as ends not means. Various
kinds of Contractual and Consensus ethics, mainly rooted in Kantian ideas, identify what is
ethical with what people can or could reasonably agree to. Virtue ethics focuses on the character of
the actor rather than on the actions or their consequences, and equates the ethical with what a
virtuous person would do in any particular situation. I shall also look very briefly at two other
theories that maybe have a more limited application but provide useful counterpoints to the the
main ones: the ethics of rights and the ethics of care.
In the following sections I shall briefly introduce each of these approaches. In the final
section I shall address the practical question of their application, looking in particular at which
theory seems to work best in which circumstances.
Utilitarianism
According to Act Utilitarianism, any action that increases total utility across society is good and
any action that decreases it is bad. To act ethically is to act so as to increase or, ideally, maximise
total utility.1
This approach is intuitively attractive. It clearly captures something important about
ethics, and seems to offer a wonderfully simple rational procedure for resolving ethical issues.
When we try to apply it, however, we run into a range of difficulties. These don’t necessarily
detract from its value as a theory. Indeed, they bring to the fore some important ethical issues that
other theories fudge or ignore. But they do make it hard to apply in many circumstances. I shall
discuss these under two headings: general procedural difficulties and difficulties of definition and
measurement.
From a procedural perspective, we often have neither the time nor the means to work out
the consequences of our actions. Many ethical decisions have to be made more or less on the spot,
when confronted with a difficult and unexpected situation – a fight, an intruder, a child in danger.
It may simply not be practical to work out, even roughly, what the consequences might be before
deciding what to do. It may not even be ethical. Stopping to calculate all the consequences before
acting has consequences itself: the child in danger might die if you delay. And even in the absence
of such consequences, stopping to calculate all the consequences before going to someone’s aid is
not what we normally think of as ethical behaviour: in the words of philosopher Bernard Williams
it's 'one thought too many'
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1 Note that I am using ‘utility’ here in a relatively broad sense, to incorporate anything we might reasonably
include in a social utility function. Some philosophers give it a much narrower meaning and would call the
approach outlined here consequentialist, but not strictly utilitarian.
4. The second set of difficulties with utilitarianism concerns definition and measurement.
First, for utilitarianism to work in practice, there must be some broad consensus as to how utility
is defined – what, in the language of economics, goes into the utility function. Is monetary wealth
an adequate measure of utility, or should we also (or only) take account of happiness, or pleasure,
or Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities, which includes measures of
freedom, human rights and equality? If pleasure counts, will any pleasure do, or only ‘healthy’
pleasures? Should we be looking only at the total sum of wealth, happiness or pleasure, or also at
the ways in which these are distributed?
These difficulties of definition carry with them difficulties of measurement. Even if we
could agree on what properties to put into the utility equation, we might not agree on how to
measure and weight them. To a large extent this is a technical issue, which complicates the
application of utilitarianism but doesn’t seriously undermine it. However, it highlights a more
fundamental difficulty in reaching consensus on what really counts. For example, since we have,
in principle at least, to reduce all factors we take account of to some common currency in order to
add them up, what price do we put on a life? Is the life of a young Wall Street banker with future
expected earnings of $200 million worth times 20,000 times the life of a middle aged Indian
peasant with future expected earnings of $10,000? Or is it worth exactly the same? More
generally, are all lives of equal value, or are some more valuable than others? If the question were
put to them in these simple terms, most people would probably say that all lives are equal, but if
we look at the policies of governments and corporations around the world, many of which are
framed at least partly on utilitarian grounds, we seem to find an almost universal assumption that
some lives are more valuable than others.
In many applications of utilitarianism these difficulties of definition and measurement are
not a major problem. They don’t impact seriously on the philosophical arguments underlying the
theory, and so long as we apply it carefully – making sure, for example, to take account of
everybody affected by a rule,2 and to take account of the indirect effects such as the effects of
setting a good or bad example or the social effects of a particular welfare distribution – we shall
often reach much the same conclusion on any plausible definition or measurement of utility. There
will inevitably be cases, however, that are sensitive to the measures we adopt, and others in which
the definition of utility is both critical and contentious. These are, of course, the most interesting
cases to explore, but they need special care.
As a final general comment on utilitarianism, one of its most striking characteristics is that
it is in one sense strictly egalitarian. Because it is concerned with the overall utility of the whole of
society, indeed the whole world, it gives no-one any intrinsic priority. Economic calculations
obscure this, but if we think of utility in terms of happiness or well-being, the utility of any one
individual is in principle as important as that of any other.
One consequence of this is that distant strangers, people we have never met, weigh just as
heavily as people who are close to us, including ourselves. Suppose I give my mother a present on
her birthday: it no doubt makes her happy, and it might make her unhappy if I didn’t do it. But for
the same money I could probably save the life of a child in the developing world and it is hard to
construct an application of utilitarianism under which this would not be better. Similarly, it would
be very hard to justify on utilitarian grounds a policy that involved paying for private health care
or private schooling in a country like Britain, when the same money could achieve far more if
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2 A common student error is to focus only on those most immediately affected - for example, in assessing the
ethics of a business policy to focus only on the consequences for the shareholders, employees and perhaps
customers of the business. A utilitarian analysis in this case must also take account of the effect on the
shareholders, employees and customers of the the firm’s competitors, which will often cancel out the effect
on the firm itself (in competitive markets one firm’s loss is another’s gain). And it must take account of the
consequences for society at large, which are generally what matter most from an ethical perspective.
6. you wouldn’t want Joe to do to you’, but ‘don’t do to anybody at all what you wouldn’t want
someone - anyone - to do to you’. The particular relationship between you and Joe is explicitly
taken out of the equation. In the second place, it refers to what you could will as a universal law,
with a view to imposing it, not to what you might merely want. The criterion is meant to be
objective, dependent only on reason and not on feelings, wishes or preferences.
How this works is contentious, but the core of Kant's idea is that you can only will
something to be a universal law if you can will it without running into any rational contradictions.
Some maxims are not universalisable because they are self-defeating (we say there is a
contradiction in conception). A maxim of making promises without necessarily intending to keep
them, for example, if universalised, would deprive the practice of promise-making of any
meaning. Expressing it another way, a universalised practice of making promises and keeping
them only when it suited would defeat the purpose of the personal maxim of making promises and
keeping them only when it suited, since no-one would take the promises seriously anyway.
Other maxims are not universalisable because they contradict the notion of humanity from
which Kant starts (in Kant’s terms there is a contradiction of will). These situations are often
handled more simply by the other formulation of the categorical imperative that we shall look at
below, but willing as universal a maxim of harming yourself or others, for example, or of
neglecting your or their development, seems contrary to what human beings, as free-willed moral
agents, are all about. There is a contradiction between the purpose of the personal maxim and the
purpose of the human will.
A second observation on the Formula of Universal Law is that while it is often applied to
individual actions it is framed, like both rule and indirect utilitarianism, in terms of general rules,
principles, maxims and indeed laws. Despite the very positive phrasing, moreover, these general
rules or maxims take the characteristic form of negative injunctions: they are about what is not
permissible. Even a seemingly positive duty, like a duty to help others, is derived by Kant in the
form of a duty not to refrain, as a principle, from helping others.
These considerations are important when it comes to application. Take, for example, the
Kantian duty not to tell lies, which can be derived in the same way as the duty not to make
promises without intending to keep them. Universalised lying when it suits destroys the practice of
truth-telling and thwarts the very purpose of lying when it suits. Some critics argue that alternative
maxims that allow for exceptions, like ‘tell lies when it suits you but not too often’ are perfectly
universalisable even though clearly unethical: the 'not too often' would ensure that the practice of
truth-telling was not destroyed. But a Kantian would respond that this last formulation is not what
we mean by a general law or rule, whether in a Kantian or in a utilitarian context. A rule might
allow for some well-defined qualifications, but not for qualifications of the 'not too often' sort.
(Nor, we might say, of the 'when it suits me' sort, but since they evoke a specific purpose Kantian
ethics can explicitly rule these out as leading to contradictions, in the way we have seen.)
Other critics argue that the Kantian duty not to tell lies is too strict: it makes no allowance
for the exceptional cases in which it would be ethical to tell a lie. As we noted earlier, all general
rules are apt to be subject to exceptions. The way we deal with these in utilitarianism is by setting
the benefits of a simple rule against the costs of it sometimes not working. The way we deal with
them in Kantian applications is by invoking other ethical principles. So there is a duty not to tell
lies but there is also a duty not to hurt people and sometimes we have to choose between these.
That we have to do this suggests a weakness in the Kantian logic, but we know from the sciences
and social sciences that all theories are imperfect, especially when faced with the messy reality of
human life, and that they can still be very useful nevertheless.
Another criticism sometimes made of the Formula of Universal Law is that it seems to
prohibit maxims that seem positively good, but could not be universalised, like ‘give away all your
money’ or ‘stay celibate’. If everyone gave away all their money there would be no-one left to
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8. merely as a means to some instrumental objective (pleasure), and not, since it impairs one’s free
will, as a proper end.
As a general ethical principle, the Formula of Humanity is unusually positive. As with
most general principles its immediate force is negative – don’t treat people merely as means – but
with that ‘merely’ it relies heavily on some positive conception of what is meant by treating
someone as an end. How much respect is enough to achieve this? Kant would say complete,
infinite respect, but what that entails in practice is hard to judge. From the Kantian perspective it is
the rational intent that matters, a ‘good will’, but it is extremely difficult to judge the intent of
other people, and almost as difficult to judge our own. The Formula works in practice, however,
because in many cases people's intentions are so far from ethical, in its terms, that they leave little
room for debate. The argument that ‘my intentions are good’ when people are being abused and
exploited is often just not credible.
Contractualist and consensus ethics
One pragmatic way of exploring whether a principle might be universalisable would be to ask
whether everybody would in fact agree to it. One way of showing respect to other people would be
to consult them on one’s action and take their views into account. Neither of these approaches is
strictly Kantian. Kant’s concern was not with whether everybody could agree to something but
with whether they could rationally will it, and if one person could rationally will it then so, on his
theory, could another. His model of human interest, likewise, was quite independent of what
people might think their interests to be. But the approaches lead us to a range of contractualist or
consensus-based theories of ethics and political justice that are broadly Kantian in their inspiration
and are particularly helpful when looking at issues of corporate or public policy.
The contractualist and consensus-based approaches we shall consider here don’t go as far
as basing the ethical just on what people will agree to. It’s a common feature of the real world that
people often don’t agree, and even when they do they’re not necessarily right: they might agree
because they share the same prejudices, or the same delusions. Instead the focus is on what
reasonable people will agree to, or what people will reasonably agree to. In Thomas Scanlon’s
formulation, ‘everyone ought to follow the principles that no-one could reasonably reject’. The
question then is how to operationalise the notion of ‘reasonable’. If we assume that people in
practice have different interests, different viewpoints and different prejudices, and that they, and
we, generally lack the Kantian detachment to formulate universal laws (even if that should be
possible in theory), how might we overcome these difficulties?
The most influential form of contractualism is due to John Rawls, who invokes the device
of a ‘veil of ignorance’. Rawls asks us to consider what conclusions would be reached by rational
agents in what he calls an ‘original position’. They know that they are members of a society but,
behind the veil of ignorance, do not know what positions they occupy in that society. Nor do they
know anything about the likelihood of their occupying different positions (they are faced with
radical uncertainty in this respect), or about their own natural strengths or weaknesses.
To provide a motivational basis for people’s reasoning, but also to sharpen the ethical
problem, Rawls assumes for argument’s sake that the agents in his original position are purely self-
interested economically rational agents. He concludes, though, that under the conditions of the veil
of ignorance, it would be in their rational interest to take account of the needs of every person,
including the weakest and the most disadvantaged, because that just might be them. Specifically,
while they might favour a system that maximised total utility, they would also impose constraints
in the form of two principles of justice. Rawls’s first principle of justice states that everybody
should have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same liberties
for others. The second principle requires that any inequalities in a society should be such as to be
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10. those situations in which there is a significant political dimension: wherever there are different and
competing interests, for example, or competing moral norms, that have somehow to be recognised
and taken into account. In contemporary society, which is characterised by cultural pluralism and
the erosion of tradition, this is very often the case.
Deliberative approaches are also helpful when social, economic and technological change
leads to the need for new moral norms or the reconsideration of old ones. Some of the most
contentious issues in contemporary morality are the product of technological developments, most
obviously in medicine and the life sciences but also in finance and business. And they are helpful
for many allocation problems. Deliberative and discourse ethics suggest, for example, that major
business decisions that differentially affect different stakeholders should be taken in a way that not
only takes account of their possible interests but also allows them to argue for these interests, and
argue for their values, in a genuine debate. There may be limits to how far this is feasible in
practice, but it ties in with the common perception that while any business has at times to make
hard decisions (decisions, for example, involving closure or redundancy, or decisions that set a
limit on health and safety or environmental protection), it matters, ethically, how those decisions
are made. Taking proper notice of people’s arguments through a deliberative process is not just a
way of building in respect but is also a demand of respect.
Virtue ethics
According to virtue ethics, what matters is the character of the actor, and by implication the
motivations of the actor, rather than the act itself or its consequences. Whereas utilitarian and
Kantian ethics develop general rules to be applied to circumstances regardless of their specifics,
virtue ethics works in the opposite direction. It looks at people’s specific responses to specific
circumstances, and judges the characters these reveal. Like the other approaches, it ends up by
making general rather than specific judgements, but inductively rather than deductively. For while
people’s characters are revealed by their actions, they are not necessarily revealed by individual
actions. To judge how ethical a fictional character is we need to read the whole novel, not just a
few pages, and the same is true of real life. We normally judge the virtue of someone not on the
basis of a single act, but on the basis of their overall behaviour, over a period of time (sometimes a
whole lifetime) and in a variety of circumstances.
Unlike utilitarianism or Kantian ethics, virtue ethics typically makes no strong theoretical
claims. It doesn’t seek to derive the virtues from first principles, but generally accepts those that
are characteristic of, and recognised within, a particular culture or community. In some versions it
serves mainly to systematise or rationalise our established social norms. The first and most famous
virtue ethicist, Confucius, argued that the traditional virtues of ancient Chinese society, such as the
virtues of loyalty and obedience, should be tempered by the core human virtues of benevolence,
justice and human-heartedness. A few generations later the founder of Western virtue ethics,
Aristotle, cast the virtues of ancient Athenian society as the temperate means between intemperate
vices. Some modern virtue ethicists have developed lists of virtues that are intended to unify and
systematise the various virtues found in different cultures, religions and traditions.
In other versions, virtue ethics is almost anti-theoretical. Most contemporary virtue
theorists argue that what is ethical depends critically on the context and specific circumstances,
and that there is a limit to how far we can usefully impose general rules on how people should act.
On this view the injunctions developed by normative ethical theories are too rigid, too insensitive
to particular circumstances, and can be counter-productive when rigorously applied, constraining
people’s ethical development and pursuit of a good life rather than advancing it.
One consequence of the emphasis virtue ethicists place on context and specific
circumstances is that the roles people occupy in society are seen as morally significant. A
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12. extremes, and a Chinese that the Americans take self-reliance to extremes. But a virtuous Chinese
is not loyal at all costs, to the exclusion of everything else. There is balance, a ‘golden mean’. And
a virtuous American does not insist on self-reliance at all costs, in all circumstances. Again there
has to be a balance and that balance will vary both according to one’s own culture and according to
the culture one is living or working in. The challenge may be greater, but it is not fundamentally
different.
In some versions, virtue ethics is closely linked with tradition, and so takes on a
conservative flavour. Whereas liberal philosophers (John Rawls, discussed above, would be an
example) tend to see communities as the creations of autonomous individuals, communitarian
philosophers see people as products of their communities, their identities inseparable from their
social context. From this perspective, the idea of an ethical life is meaningless when divorced from
the traditions that have shaped a society. There is then a temptation to identify the weakening of
moral norms characteristic of modern society, which often seems to take its values more from
economic calculations and opinion polls than from any form of ethical reflection, with a
fragmentation of community and loss of tradition, and to call for these to be revived.
Virtue ethics doesn’t have to be conservative, however. Another response to the same
problem would be that the old traditions have lost their relevance and that something new is
needed in their place. Strong traditions often impose a conformity that is every bit as insensitive to
circumstances as Kantian or utilitarian theories and one of the things virtue ethics can do is to
challenge over-rigid norms. That is, indeed, precisely how Confucius used it. It is also worth
noting here that virtuous people do not necessarily conform. A virtuous person will generally
follow the prevailing social norms, but will also know when to and how to breach them.
Because of its sensitivity to context and its commitment to looking at a situation as a
whole rather than abstracting from it, virtue ethics can provide a useful language for exploring the
shifts in ethical norms that we are already experiencing – shifts in the norms relating to sexual
activity, for example, or marriage, or familial relationships, as well as in norms relating to business
and finance. A key point here is that when we look at the ethics of a particular practice or set of
practices we are often not looking at some completely new phenomenon, but at a change in
attitude based on changing priorities and changing perceptions. If we treat sex outside marriage, to
take one example, as an act that is either right or wrong, we quickly get locked into a futile
dispute. But if we ask instead what a virtuous person would do when faced with a situation in
which sex outside marriage is a possibility, we have more room for manoeuvre. We can perhaps
think of characters, in fiction or in real life, who have chosen for the sex, even though traditional
norms weighed against it, but who nevertheless seem to be have been virtuous characters. We can
ask what it was about the circumstances that made their choice, their weighing of the alternatives,
reasonable, and to what extent such circumstances are more widely applicable. We can ask what
virtues the tradition was trying to protect, and at what cost to other virtues, and we can ask how
those virtues might best be represented in the changed circumstances of contemporary society.
Similarly when we look at the practices of one tradition set within another, as finance is
set within contemporary society, or one tradition set against another as in cross-cultural conflicts,
enquiring how a virtuous person would behave gives scope for balancing and negotiating between
the different values of the two traditions in a way that asking whether an act is right or wrong does
not.
What recommends the virtue approach in cases like these is its combined sensitivity to the
social context of community and tradition, the uniqueness of situations and the complexities of
real life. This keeps it grounded in reality and focused on the real decisions that real people have to
make, rather than on the artificial or abstract decisions of the philosophy textbook. It is not
theoretically rigorous, but that is the point. In a complex situation which theories struggle to grasp
it can sometimes help to be evidence-driven rather than theory driven – or at least to combine the
two approaches.
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14. delivered. It could be said that governments are under an obligation to develop societies in which
such institutional frameworks are operative, but in their absence it remains unclear what
obligations the rights of a starving person place on whom. If I come across somebody who is
starving and if I have lots of food, then I may have a moral duty to give them some – but I may
not. And if they are not starving but uneducated, then I probably don’t have an obligation to stop
and teach them – though it could be argued that in some circumstances I do.
The discussion of welfare rights in the last paragraph also serves to make the point that
although the rights listed in the Universal Declaration are presented as universal they are in fact
culturally specific. The declaration is a product of the developed world and of a specific time in
history, when the family unit was the ethical norm, women didn’t work, and the claimants of rights
could be described as ‘himself and his family’.
Another disadvantage of the language of rights in ethics is that it tends to confuse two
different concepts, one moral and the other legal. This is particularly apparent in the case of
property rights, the concept of which is legal rather than ethical in origin. Unlike most other rights,
which are claimed by those in serious need, the right to property, which is enshrined in the
Universal Declaration, is typically claimed most loudly and most forcefully by those who already
have a lot of it and who are driven by greed and acquisitiveness to hold on to it, even though
others may be starving. It used to be the bulwark of slave owners (whose slaves were their
property). Today it is used to defend the wealthy against the very tax demands that would make
possible the basic welfare rights of the poor.
Linked with the issue of property rights is that of corporate rights. In America in particular
companies are legal persons and often eager to claim the rights that go with that personhood,
including not only the right to property but also the right to free speech – which, in a television
age, they can afford much more easily than can the individuals on whose interests they trample.
A further practical problem increasingly faced by the ethics of rights is that for many
minority or disadvantaged communities (women, gays, blacks in a white society, Muslims in a
Christian society, aboriginals, and so on) individual rights may not be enough. What most of these
groups are asking for is simply to be treated with respect and dignity, and in theory this should be
achievable through individual rights. The foundational concepts of the Universal Declaration are
indeed human dignity and a spirit of brotherhood. But history casts a shadow and groups argue
quite reasonably that even though they have individual rights they are still disadvantaged by
historical prejudice. They therefore call for collective rights, and for their enforcement through
affirmative action, positive discrimination or compulsory education. The fact that such collective
rights impinge on the rights of other people is not perhaps a crucial problem: rights often appear to
conflict with each other, just as obligations do. The introduction of a further meaning of ‘rights’,
and the linking of individual Kantian ends with complex questions of identity, does however
complicate an already complicated subject.
The ethics of care
One of the achievements of the human rights movement has been to achieve greater equality for
women. In theory, the recognition of equal rights for women goes back to the utilitarians and Kant,
for whom all people were equal in value and equally deserving of respect. In practice, however,
this equality was rarely realised. The old idea that the virtues appropriate to women are different
from and in some way less than the virtues appropriate to men, which can be found not only in the
major religions but also in the more critical virtue ethics of Aristotle, was still present in the
writing of Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers. And it is still present, albeit less explicitly,
in much contemporary ethics. The French and American revolutionaries who championed the
cause of equal rights for all would not have dreamt of giving women a vote, let alone a more
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16. In many ways the ethics of care is similar to Confucian ethics. Both start from a relational
model of personal identity. Instead of being seen as atomistic individuals, people are treated as
being defined by their relationships. Both take the most intimate relationships, those of the family,
as models for ethical behaviour generally. And both hold that ethics cannot be fully captured by
general rules. Every situation is unique and every person is unique; what is ethical depends both
on the specifics of the situation and on the specifics of the relationship involved. The difference
between Confucian ethics and the ethics of care is, however, a significant one. For whereas
Confucian ethics, which is rooted in the hierarchical structure of traditional Chinese society,
privileges the relationships between men and takes as the archetypal relationship that between a
son and his father, the ethics of care takes as its archetypal relationship that between a mother and
her child. To the extent that the ethics of care is defined by its virtues, this leads to an emphasis on
the virtues of empathy and of attention and receptiveness to the (unspoken) needs of others, as
well as the more traditional virtues of compassion, fidelity and trustworthiness.
The ethics of care is not generally described as a virtue theory, and in some ways it is in
evident tension with more normal kinds of virtue ethics. It is radical rather than conservative, and
is founded directly upon experience and intuition rather than upon tradition. As in virtue ethics,
however, it is the character of a person that ultimately matters, and this is revealed not in isolated
acts but in a variety of circumstances and, especially, through its embodiment in a variety of
personal relationships.
Applying normative ethics
In discussing the various approaches to be used we have already given some indication of their
strengths and weaknesses. Choosing which approach or approaches to apply to any given problem
is often the greatest challenge facing students, however, and while there are no absolute answers it
may be helpful to set out some general guidelines.
Utilitarianism was first applied to public policy issues and that still may be where it’s most useful.
It can be applied to the evaluation of a general public policy norm (‘people should act in their
narrow economic self-interest’ would be a relevant current example); to compare regulatory
principles or policies (rules versus principles, alternative rules for setting bank’s capital ratios); to
changes in the law (the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley); or to corporate policies (governing sales and
marketing, for example, or tax avoidance, or facilitating payments).
At the personal level, utilitarianism is normally applied to rules of behaviour or general
classes of actions rather than to individual acts. We may use straightforward act utilitarianism to
analyse specific one-off cases, where the consequences are significant, but we shall not generally
use it to provide justifications for breaking general rules in specific cases.
Utilitarianism works best when the consequences are easily identified, predicted and
measured. The closer the problem is to one in which the simple economic consequences are what
matter, the more straightforward the application. It is much harder to apply when the consequences
are hard to identify or measure, when there is a lot of uncertainty, or when non-economic factors
are important. We need to be especially careful when an action or rule carries significant costs or
suffering for minorities (or indeed for small numbers of people generally), or impacts on people’s
fundamental rights or freedoms.
Kantian ethics is often most effective when utilitarianism is least so. Like utilitarianism we use it
to analyse general rules or principles, but generally where the focus is on personal behaviour
(personal maxims), and interpersonal relationships, rather than corporate or public policy, . These
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18. measures, arguing that people in the original position would wish to maximise overall utility, but
subject to distributional constraints that give some protection of the less advantaged. This
approach enables us to combine broadly utilitarian objectives with a Kantian-like consideration of
people’s rights and freedoms.
Consensus ethics is not something we can apply directly in a book or classroom to get
answers to ethical questions. The whole point of it is that the answers should come from
deliberation amongst those who are actually affected. What we can do is point to situations where
the process of forming a consensus seems particularly appropriate. These might include, most
obviously, cases where those charged with framing a policy or regulation simply don’t know how
people will be subjectively affected by it, and can’t find out except through a deliberative process.
They may also include cases where there are strong indications that the people framing a policy
could have found out how it would impact on people but didn’t bother to do so, or relied on
culturally biased or prejudiced assumptions, or intentionally distorted the evidence. In some cases
we might find that the processes used had obvious flaws, or we might know enough ourselves
about affected groups to doubt the views attributed to them.
Virtue ethics is applied, like Kantian ethics, to people in their relationships with other people, and
not to corporations. But whereas Kantian ethics is applied to general rules and focuses on how
people should treat different situations according to the same rules, virtue ethics focuses on the
specifics and how people should treat different situations differently.
The application of virtue ethics is more an art than a science. What we don’t do is write
down a list of virtues and tick them off. Apart from the need to take account of exactly how the
virtues are applied in practice and of the balance between them, the approach needs to be
reflective. In the language of the social sciences the methodology is interpretive not hypothetico-
deductive. It seeks insights not demonstrations. A good virtue analysist also needs to be virtuous:
sensitive to the situations being analysed, temperate and even-handed, sympathetic towards the
actors and so on.
We noted earlier that virtue ethics is a good approach to use when looking at situations of
cultural change, where it helps us to relate the new circumstances to the old. It is also appropriate
to issues of everyday ethics, where the rightness or wrongness of particular acts is not always what
really matters. Whether at home or at work, many people’s lives are characterised by a need to
balance a variety of different responsibilities. Look at any one of the decisions made and you
would have no idea whether or not a manager was behaving morally. Look at a series of such
decisions and you can begin to judge whether they are acting fairly, prioritising responsibly, and so
on. Indeed an evaluation of whether someone’s behaviour is fair or unfair almost inevitably
requires us to look at multiple actions over a period of time, and at the balance they achieve.
Virtue ethics can also help us to understand how people might behave ethically in
particular roles. Some roles seem on the face of it to license behaviours that would normally be
considered unethical. Others impose heightened ethical responsibilities. In practice, different
characters are attracted to different roles and we tend to compare bankers with other bankers and
priests with other priests, but a careful application of virtue ethics allows us to separate the person
from the role and look at the person (citizen, member of the community) in a role. Other
approaches cannot achieve this level of subtlety.
The language of human rights is most useful when it addresses our behaviour towards those
whose interests are most easily neglected: the poor, the disabled, the discriminated against and all
those who are in some way disenfranchised. In these cases it is very often fundamental liberty
rights that are at stake, and consideration of these leads us straight to duties and obligations. The
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20. this context, the orthodox theories are likely to lead to very similar conclusions, and if they are
biased they are likely to be biased in the same general direction.
With its more flexible concept of reason and its greater reliance on emotional experience the ethics
of care offers a recognisably different perspective on the moral world. There is no reason to
suppose that it is any less socially conditioned, but to the extent that it too is biased it is likely to
be in a different direction. Of the ethical theories at our disposal it is perhaps the most likely to
pick up points that the orthodox theories may miss.
It is also helpful to bear in mind more generally the feminist critiques of mainstream ethical
theory, not all of which are actually embodied in the ethics of care. In particular, whenever an
analysis claims to treat people equally, whether as Kantian ends, as bearers of utility or of rights,
as participants in a hypothetical social contract or real deliberative process, we should ask whether
this is really the case, or whether the theoretical ascription of equality masks real-world
inequalities.
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